Sounds Around Town: Bassist Gary Peacock recalls a few career highlights

Tuesday

Oct 31, 2017 at 9:44 AMOct 31, 2017 at 9:44 AM

By Ed Symkus Correspondent

It took a long time for jazz legend Gary Peacock to get around to finding the right instrument. As a young kid, he was drawn to the piano, partially because his mother played it and his sister studied it. In his teens, after hearing Gene Krupa on the radio, he added drums to his performance repertoire. But it wasn’t till he hit his 20s and in the army, that he found his calling: the double bass.

Peacock has played that instrument with jazz luminaries including Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Tony Williams, and Paul Bley, and he had a long run in the “standards trio” with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette. He brings his current bandmates – Marc Copland on piano, and Joey Baron on drums – to the Regattabar on Nov. 10 in celebration of their new album “Tangents.”

Peacock, 82, spoke about how the bass came into his life, as well as many other points in his illustrious career, by phone from his home in Claryville, NY.

“I was stationed in a very small town called Gelnhausen in Germany,” he said. “I started a quintet, playing piano. The drummer was Redd Holt, who was later in the Ramsey Lewis Trio. We played once a week at the enlisted men’s club and once a week at the officers’ club. But the bass player got married, and his wife didn’t want him out anymore. So I said to Redd, ‘We’ve gotta find us a bass player.’ He said, ‘Nobody wants to play bass. YOU play bass.’ I said, ‘No, I want to play piano.’ He said, ‘No, I heard you dinging around on the bass. You play that and I’ll find us a pianist.’ And that’s what happened. So, in a sense, it was by default that I began playing bass. That was around 1956.”

At the end of his military stint Peacock moved to Los Angeles, and immediately fell in with some mainstream jazz payers, from Bud Shank to Art Pepper to Barney Kessel.

“That was due to a lot of networking,” he said. “Making phone calls, going from session to session. There were many places for me to work at that time in L.A., and I would take anything. I spent a lot of time with my instrument, and being able to put in five or six hours a day, on a regular basis, you naturally start to improve.”

Peacock kept on improving, and he became an in-demand bass player. He refers to the brief 1964 tour he did with the Miles Davis, when Miles’ regular bassist Ron Carter needed some time off, as “one of the most significant experiences in my development.” He also admitted that at the initial gig with that group, where he had met Miles for the first time just before going on, he had a case of the nerves.

“I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen,” he said. “But we got up to play and very shortly after we started, the only thing I was aware of was the music, and Miles, playing. So, whatever I was carrying around with me at the time kind of fell away and it became just about the music.”

The range of styles and players he’s worked with over the years stretches from the laid back feel of pianist Bill Evans to the totally “out there” free jazz of saxophonist Albert Ayler. But he insists that no matter the situation, his own approach doesn’t change.

“The whole point of jazz, for me, and I’m sure for many other musicians, is improvisation,” he said. “So, then the question is, what IS improvisation? Can it be learned? Can you study it? Initially one starts out and they listen, they may try to emulate someone they feel is really close to them, they develop skills and study theory. As you do that, you keep progressing; you have more information, more understanding. All that is great but eventually you reach a point where there’s something missing. So, what to do? What to do, ultimately, is nothing. It’s simply to listen. Keep developing your understanding of music, keep developing your hearing, study more theory, if you want, but then let it all go. The degree to which you hang on to what you’ve learned and what you know is the degree to which you stop this very thing that you’re aspiring for.”

Which is part of what makes the current trio work. Well, that and the fact that they just seem to fit together.

Marc and I go back to around 1983,” he said of his pianist. “I was living in Seattle, he came out to work in a club there, and he asked the club owner to recommend a bass player. He mentioned me, we worked a weekend at a club in University District, and we recognized a musical kinship right away. We stayed in touch and did duo and trio work over the years.

“A few years ago we were going to do a gig at Birdland in New York, and Joey was available for that one,” he added, referring to his drummer. “We did the gig and Marc and I immediately knew this was the guy for a trio.”

With two albums to their credit – “Now This” in 2015 and the brand new “Tangents” – the trio plans to work much of their Regattabar show around them.

“We’ll have a set list, but we won’t put it together till we get to the club,” said Peacock. “Then we’ll figure out how long we’re going to play, and how many tunes. So it’s kind of a collective decision on what pieces we’ll do and in what order.”

The Gary Peacock Trio is at the Regattabar in Cambridge on Nov. 10 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $30. Info: 617-395-7757.